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This Sunday’s Book Review section of the September 5, 2010 New York Times leads with David Oshinsky’s Freedom Trains, a highly favorable review of Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “The Warmth of Other Suns.” As Oshinsky notes, Wilkerson lifted her title from the work of writer Richard Wright, who used it to describe the quest for better opportunities that blacks in the American South saw in the North. The massive proportions of that migration are captured in Wilkerson’s subtitle, “The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” which, between 1915 (at the height of Jim Crow) and 1970, resulted in the northward march of six million black people.

One sentence in Oshinsky’s review deserves, I think, special attention. One newspaper, the Chicago Defender, was a major source of information for Southern blacks seeking to find their way north. Oshinsky notes, almost in passing, that the Chicago Defender achieved its influence because it was “[s]muggled into Southern railroad depots by Pullman porters, dropped off by barnstorming black athletes and entertainers . . . .”

So now the obvious question: Why the clandestine activities? Answer: because helping African-Americans leave the Old South was an illegal activity under state law.

But why? If blacks were despised and demeaned in the South, the Southern segregationists should be thrilled to pay black families to head north. After all, five hundred or a thousand miles creates what looks to be the ideal form of segregation.

Yet, the historical practice was to the contrary. The explanation for this consistent pattern is consistent with the rest of the sorry history of Jim Crow, which runs through Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

What bears recounting here, however, is the economic explanation for keeping despised blacks trapped in the South. Quite simply, there is no way to economically exploit individuals by letting them leave. The entire system of segregation has, in some quarters, been grotesquely treated as though it were some form of market system, when in fact it was anything but. The key feature of a market system is ease of entry and exit, which puts pressure on all economic players.

By blocking exit from the South, the segregationists sought to limit the options open to blacks, whom they could exploit on the farm, in the city, and everywhere in between. The underground railroad of 1915 does not carry the same connotations as the underground railroad of 1850, when the stakes were far higher. But it shows the same steely determination to use stealth to undermine a formal set of restrictions, even if (unlike the earlier underground railroad) the restrictions were not backed by a constitutional duty to return slaves (or, to use the guarded language of the Constitution, those “held to labor or service”) to their true owners in the South.

But the effort to preserve segregation by controlling exit rights is only one side of the story. The other side involves controlling entry into the old South, namely by Northern businessmen, who might be prepared to bid up the price of Southern African-American labor. These entrepreneurs need not hold any special affection for Southern black laborers. It is enough that they see an economic opportunity to compete in national markets by taking advantage of cheap labor.